


CSI Twilight Zone: X-Files Season 9, "Audrey Pauley"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [28]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Season 9, Twilight Zone - Freeform, audrey pauley - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-16 23:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2288156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’ve been saying all along that Doggett is a decent character but not right for the X-Files. The same could be said (by people who are not as turned off by Gish and by New Age fuzziness as I am) about Reyes. Just as his natural habitat is the cop show, hers is the Twilight Zone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	CSI Twilight Zone: X-Files Season 9, "Audrey Pauley"

 

Here’s a surprising thing about the first half of Season 9:

Overall, the Reyes & Doggett Monster of the Weeks are actually better than the arc episodes continuing the Scully & Mulder saga.

Admittedly you would not have to work too hard to do better than what is on view in “Trust No 1,” “Provenance,” and “Providence.” And “Daemonicus” really sucked enough for two or three episodes. But I have to say that there have been a few Doggett & Reyes MOTWs that I have actually enjoyed, including “4-D,” “John Doe,” and now “Audrey Pauley.” I mean none of them recapture the glory days of the X-Files, but they’re decent workmanlike TV episodes that are no worse than much of what was out there in prime time in the early 2000s. Doggett’s emotional range is getting wider, and the Doggett/Reyes relationship is getting slightly more compelling, although I think they’re pushing them into that ship a little too fast. I still really have trouble with Gish. It’s her voice. It’s just…there’s nothing interesting about it in and of itself, and she does so little to make it expressive. 

But overall, the plots are better; and this is mainly due to Steven Maeda, who went on to work as writer/producer for a number of respectable shows ( _Lost, CSI: Miami, Lie To Me_ ). Maeda also wrote a couple  _Harsh Realm_ episodes, which might perhaps have something to do with his predilection for alternate reality plots. Anyway, although there is nothing really that original about “Audrey Pauley,” it is a nice bit of writing with some good character work for Doggett and with some interesting touches put on an extremely venerable concept. The fact that Audrey Pauley, the mentally handicapped woman who has some kind of magical access to the twilight world of three brain-dead coma patients, is played by the same actress who played the very damaged abduction survivor Lucy in “Oubliette” is a nice touch too; Lucy dies at the end of “Oubliette,” so one could imagine that maybe her ghost or reincarnation has come to work in this hospital and help poor Monica Reyes out. Reyes is admitted to the hospital after being sideswiped by a drunk driver; she finds herself in an alternate reality where she’s wandering a deserted hospital which appears to be traveling through space. Slowly, she comes to realize that the lack of detail in this hospital (the charts are all gibberish; the technology doesn’t work) indicates that it’s not a ‘real’ environment but a mock-up of some kind. She’s thinking film set; but we by this point know it’s a dollhouse constructed by Audrey. Audrey’s mind somehow picks up the wandering spirits of these brain-dead but living people and puts them in the house, where she is able to communicate with them.

Anyway, the uncanniness of the dollhouse was the basis for one of the classic original  _Twilight Zone_ episodes, “A Stopover in a Quiet Town”:

 

 

in which a couple wakes up in a strange house and gradually comes to realize it’s a dollhouse which is part of a model town. Rather unfortunately, this episode ends with the child who owns the dollhouse showing up and towering over them like a giant while they scream in terror. “Audrey Pauley” handles it more subtly than that; the doll-hospital in which Reyes is trapped is not a physical model, but a kind of mental model of a physical model, and Reyes is ultimately able to escape from it with Audrey’s help.

In the meantime, there’s a whole investigation going on about the doctor who put Monica in a coma in the first place, in which once again we discover that no episode is really big enough for both female leads; Scully’s essentially given one thing to do (autopsy one of the doctor’s victims) and it has no bearing on the plot.

Anyway, my point is: I’ve been saying all along that Doggett is a decent character but not right for the X-Files. The same could be said (by people who are not as turned off by Gish and by New Age fuzziness as I am) about Reyes. Just as his natural habitat is the cop show, hers is the Twilight Zone. In a Twlight Zone-y plot like “4-D” or “Audrey Pauley,” her blankness as a character isn’t as much of a hindrance; the point is she could be any of us trying to make sense of a new and strange reality and find her way home from it. 

 _The X-Files_ wasn’t  _The Twilight Zone._ Both shows made paranoia an art form, but  _The X-Files,_ for all its craziness. is pretty firmly anchored to this particular quantum reality. What creates the paranoia in  _The X-Files_  is not that you’ve entered a strange new twilight world, but that you’re in the world as you thought you knew it and HOLY SHIT LOOK WHAT’S IN HERE. The paranoia derives not from uncertainty about where you are or whether it’s real, but from the fact that the things you are certain that you’ve seen are denied and disavowed by everyone outside your inner circle. An episode of  _The Twilight Zone_ could be set anywhere in any number of universes, and often it centers around someone who has suddenly entered a new reality and has no idea how it works. 

So really, if instead of trying to morph the X-Files universe to fit Doggett and Reyes, CC had just wrapped up the X-Files after “One Son”—“Requiem” at the _latest_ — and given Doggett and Reyes a clean start as the leads of a brand new show, he might eventually have had something here. He could have called it _Law & Order: Alternative Realities Unit_ or  _CSI: Twilight Zone_. And that way  _The X-Files_ would have had a decent burial, and we wouldn’t have had this Miracle Baby story line which appears to be going from bad to worse.


End file.
